Scott Allard

Scott W. Allard is the Daniel J. Evans Endowed Professor of Social Policy at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, and served as Associate Dean for Research and Engagement from 2021 to 2025. At UW, Allard is co-director of the UW Elections Database Project. He is an affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) and the West Coast Poverty Cente at UW, as well as a research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also served as a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program from 2010 to 2020. He previously held faculty positions at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University (2000–03), the Department of Political Science at Brown University (2003–08), and in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago (2008–14).

His primary areas of research expertise are urban poverty, employment among low-skill workers, food security, safety net utilization, and the spatial accessibility of governmental and nongovernmental safety net programs. He is author of Out of Reach: Place, Poverty, and the New American Welfare State (2009, Yale University Press), which examines the contemporary social service safety net through survey interviews with almost 1,500 government, for-profit, and nonprofit social service organizations. In 2017, he published a book entitled Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty, which focuses upon the rise in poverty in America’s suburban areas and the stubborn persistence of poverty in urban areas. He is working with the Michigan Recession and Recovery Study—a panel survey of households in metropolitan Detroit—to examine how working poor families are coping in a persistently sluggish regional economy. He also is a co-investigator with the Seattle Minimum Wage Study, which is a multi-faceted evaluation of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance. More recently, he has led research examining vote-by-mail in Washington State. In addition to these projects, he has published several articles on the geography of contemporary social welfare policy and on social service delivery in the post-welfare reform era that have appeared in a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, Journal of Politics, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Policy Studies Journal, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Social Science Quarterly, and Urban Affairs Review. He served as a Managing Editor at the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) from 2018 to 2021.

Allard has received research grants supporting his work on social welfare policy from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Russell Sage Foundation, The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, The New York Community Trust, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research (UKCPR), the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), and the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI). From 2013-19, he served as co-primary investigator of the Family Self-Sufficiency Data Center at the University of Chicago.